Skyfall Put Honestly

First up: spoiler alert. Don’t read this if you haven’t watched the movie yet.

For you others, what did you think? Here’s my two cents.

Edit: This is turning out to be a long post. As a mini table of contents, I talk about plot devices, scientific accuracy, and finally draw connections to how this movie continues the Batman villain theme.

Fair warning, I analyse texts based on two things: scientific accuracy and quality as a written story. Yes, state of the art cinematic techniques, blah blah. Let’s get to the real stuff that you can’t just do with money.

The movie itself was more or less what I expected. Typical Bond movie sans the old school high tech gadgetry (a bit of an oxymoron there?) but with good pace due mostly to cinematography. They did do a cheeky reference to the new Bond movies’ lack of gadgets, perhaps in response to fan criticism: “Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don’t do that stuff any more”. The movie seems to have tried to introduce gadgetry a bit more, especially in the final scene where they rig up a manor with booby traps. Not really “gadgets” in the old school sense, but I think there was still an intentional theme of “creative ways to make tools that kill stuff”. No, it was quite alright and enjoyable to watch. However, put that aside and we’ve got a few problems.

First of all, the story. Unfortunately, this movie just confirms the declining quality of modern day writers. Out of Daniel Craig’s Bond movies, Casino Royale had the best storyline. It was concise and did not overstep itself. It was coherent, had its twists and climaxes, and finished very tidily. I well planned out and executed story. Next was Quantum of Solace, the complete opposite. It bit off more than it could chew, setting the scene for a previously unheard of organisation that had infiltrated everything and was omnipotently powerful. It introduced so much: political warfare, battle over resources, and the concept of “you never know who you can trust”. Then it realised that it couldn’t finish this in one movie so it went and crapped on itself by skipping ahead very rapidly, getting very messy, and then finishing and never again mentioning this organisation despite how amazingly powerful it is. All he did was kill one member. Talk about anti-climax. The difference? Casino Royale is an old storyline. It was remade. Old writers are better at their craft. I think I touched on this in my rant on recently published books; perhaps I’m the victim of a changing society but social pressures and the drive to make money (off the mainstream, because that’s where money is) has led to a lot of shoddy writing these days, from games, to books, to movies, and even to shop signs. Regardless, it’s a fact that writers are different these days. I just think the new ones are a disappointment.

Feel free to agree or disagree with me on that. It’s an opinion and a sentiment I’m sure many older writers and readers will agree on.

Back to Skyfall. The story was better than Quantum of Solace. At least it wrapped up. However, there wasn’t that much substance to it and unfortunately, there were a lot of logic farts and stupid plot devices. Before I start getting scientific up in here let’s start from the beginning. Moneypenny is ordered to take a shot at the beginning, which hits Bond instead of the target. Ok, fair enough. Then she spends the next five seconds staring at Bond’s falling body and the escaping target. Hmm … TAKE ANOTHER GODDAMN SHOT. Ok, maybe if it was a flintlock with a single round in it, but no, she’s clearly holding an automatic weapon. She could have held the trigger down since she already hit Bond anyway. So the first plot device of this movie is a huge fuckup (pardon the language but that’s the best word to describe it), to which the rest of the movie is dedicated to fixing.

Now let’s get a bit scientific. There were a lot of things, as usual, that Hollywood decided didn’t have to follow physics. Many of these can be ignored because it’s an action flick. Fair enough. Causing an entire island to be abandoned due to “hacking” and spreading a rumour about a chemical leak? Ok. Let’s ignore the fact that stuff like that is usually checked. Like, the government sends in dudes in hazmat suits to assess if the leakage will affect any other areas. But ok, let’s ignore that. Then the computer network he has set up there. Fair enough, he managed to buy and ship all that gear to the island, supply the entire island with power and get internet access without anyone realising “hold on, that place is meant to be abandoned, why is there so much electrical power going into the place?”; let’s forget all that.

But the hacking thing? Again, I understand you can make money off mainstream audiences that don’t know any better but no, hacking is not some embodiment of god in your computer screen. You can’t just “click and it’s done”. So much of the movie was based on hacking and none of it was feasible. The more tech savvy of you lot will have been facepalming during the hacking scenes because they were so rife with errors. Normally, I’d let it slide but because the movie literally hinged on hacking, I had to bring it up. It’s practically a deus ex machina in that it was the excuse for several plot points.

Oh and, you know how the hero always jumps aside as fire is shooting down a tunnel? Yeah, it doesn’t work that way. Fire “travels” by burning oxygen. You can jump anywhere you want, it’s going to follow you. And after you survive, there’ll be no oxygen in the tunnels for a while, depending on how deep, twisting, etc. the tunnels are. I see this so much in action movies and it’s beginning to be annoying.

Now, introducing the villain, Silva:

Here’s where things get interesting. It seems Batman has kicked off a new era of villains. The psychotic, chaotic villain with questionable goals and even more questionable sanity is becoming popular. You know when something is popular when others try to copy it. By the way, I say chaotic intentionally – refer to an old post of mine about why we love villains so much.

Let me just get one last scientific pain the ass out of the way. Cyanide does not do that to you. I’m assuming you’ve watched the movie if you’ve read to this point, but to clarify, he pulls out part of his jaw and said the cyanide did that to him. No, cyanide is a form of a toxic inhalant. It can be administered in a variety of ways, but inhalation is the main issue. Further, it causes cell mortality via prevention of cell respiration. It’s not acid, it can’t melt your face off. Hydrogen cyanide does have a boiling point at room temperature but trust me, the bones in your jaw and skull can withstand that kind of heat. Again, it will not cause whatever the hell he had in the movie. Nor would you be likely to survive such a thing, or maintain any facial function if it did happen.

There was a lot of emphasis in the movie on his psychological state. Feelings of abandonment and suffering were imparted, though perhaps not enough to create an optimal level of audience sympathy, but there was that concept that he wasn’t completely wrong. His random acts of terror and being “one step ahead” was very reminiscent of the Joker, and the strangely lucid insanity only added to that effect. However, it did not achieve the same effects as the Joker because of a variety of reasons.

He won’t be a villain to remember, nor will the movie, but regardless, it was interesting to take note of how trends in media and texts are moving. This might be the period of amazing villains. Certainly, the villain demonstrated more character than Bond. Bond is the typical rogue hero. His vocabulary seems to be constituted entirely of snappy one-liners and his emotional range seems stuck on serious, cheeky and badass. Fair enough, but that makes for a very two-dimensional character. What I’m getting at is that heroes are very restricted but villains have unlimited potential. Again, you’ll have to read the article on villains to understand what I’m referring to. It’s an old article and messy. All my long posts are messy because I write what comes to mind so it tends to be disorganised collections of thoughts.

Anyway, enjoyable movie and it achieved it’s desired results, though to what degree is questionable. I still maintain that Casino Royale was the best of the three, mainly due to the strong storyline and just how “clean” it felt to watch.

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I concur. Still, I really enjoyed Sky Fall, great fun – best not to look too deep into modern genre where it’s gone beyond the original writers vision.
The reason why Casino was more “solid” as it’s based on an original authors story and he sat long and hard writing it. I wrestled with the same questions as you did, and thought best to leave it. Can you really expect anyone to be a new Fleming? It’s like Hitch Hikers, there will NEVER be another Douglas Adams, the new book in the series the first few paragraphs I was put off, you just can’t write in the style of another person it’s impossible – why even try? So what are you left with? Just a Distillation of the original ideas, writing homoeopathy if you will.
So understanding this, I could enjoy Sky Fall for what it was, a highly distilled bond – let’s face it Fleming is dead. Bond therefore is dead really, we are just watching modern distilled interpretations. It’s pure madness to even try and compare the new Hitch Hikers book to the rest.
So the future of bond? Well when I left watching Sky Fall I came up with tonnes of ideas how a new bond could work. The new writers really just need to let go completely and just admit, Fleming is dead and find a new writer. There are really a lot of crazy stuff in the world that a “new” generation bond can tackle. I just hope they realise they have to let go off Fleming and find a new writer/s that can really create a new deep bond for the modern age. Sky Fall could have been uber brilliant if they developed the theme of a julian assange accidental mastermind publishing the world’s secrets – they could have really went deep. They just scratched the surface. They went more comic super hero style, with more action really – lazy but, hey easy money! A true bond? For that you really need ONE writer and vision to sit in the Caribbean hideway for several years deeply thinking about and being truly in love with a new bond. I doubt they’ve figured this out yet, that each bond really needs to be based on a deeply thought out novel. It’s now just a money making machine. To me though the joy of the early novels and distilled character is still enough to enjoy it – just. I just they owners of Bond figure out what really needs to be done, but it’s doubtful. They are still playing catch up to the original novels. For now though, the introduction action scene and intro titles do show some real bond love and that’s enough for me, you know it’s going to be downhill from there.